A Song Twice Over (54 page)

‘Would it be a bad thing if somebody
did
catch him alone on the moor?'

‘Maybe not. But I couldn't do it, Daniel. Could you?'

Daniel hesitated, and then sighed. ‘No. I'd even like to. But when it came to it … No. More's the pity.'

‘And that's just what it is, isn't it. Pity.' Luke's voice was completely without sentimentality. ‘A lad who's lived worse than a stray dog. Never enough to eat. Barefoot until he learned how to steal himself a pair of clogs – and then, I reckon, he'd never manage to get the right size. Verminous and lousy too, as I remember him, since the house he lived in was crawling with bed-bugs and lice and a rare assortment of fleas. Everybody knew about the Rattrie brand of fleas in St Jude's, I can tell you, so nobody would ever have anything to do with him. And St Jude's isn't very particular. A lad has to be really dirty, really scabby and mangy and mucky to stand out in
that
neighbourhood. Oliver stood out. Now he has a new coat and real leather boots, I notice, and smells of strong soap – maybe a mite too strongly. So he's come up in the world, by his standards, I reckon …'

‘He doesn't like you, does he.'

‘Ah well –' Luke's wide, strong mouth smiled, just a little, its movement crinkling the fair skin at his eye corners. ‘No. I suppose he doesn't.'

And for a moment that was all he said, his eyes seeing through the winter dark to some warm memory which evidently gave him pleasure and which – it seemed – he intended keeping to himself.

‘Does he have a reason? To dislike you, I mean?' Daniel was unashamedly curious, his interest in this tall, craggy, quiet man increasing with his liking and respect. Already he considered Luke Thackray to be a friend – friendship springing up rapidly between travelling men – and one had a right, surely, to know the hearts and minds, and possibly the loves, of one's friends.

Although he was far from certain that Luke would tell him.

He did.

‘Yes.' He was speaking slowly, still smiling very slightly. Could it even be tenderly? ‘There's a reason. A girl. He certainly can't have her. But then – neither can I.'

‘Do you want her?'

‘Oh yes.' There was no hesitation. No doubt. No self-pity. ‘I want her all right.'

‘Could you get her?'

Luke hesitated again but only briefly this time. ‘Oliver Rattrie seems to think so,' he said. ‘And –
yes
– I reckon I'd have a chance. But it wouldn't do. There'd be no happiness in it, you see. Not for long. Like needs like, they say. I reckon I agree.'

Was that a sufficient reason? Abruptly, shockingly, the memory of Cara Adeane shot into Daniel's mind and lodged there like a poisonous, precious dart, causing him pain.

Once it had been sufficient for her.

Never quite, it seemed, for him.

‘If you want her, Luke, then – for God's sake –
take
her. I know what I'm saying.'

‘Aye. I reckon you do.'

‘Take her, Luke, and worry about the rights and wrongs and the common sense of it later. I'm telling you. If you let her go you'll regret it.'

‘I know.'

‘But you'll let her go just the same.'

It was neither a question nor a rebuke, simply a statement of cold, not always sweet, reason. So people left each other every day, because a career or a conscience might suffer. Because mamma or papa – or a husband – would not like it. Because it would not do. Not for long. His hands clenching into fists he was conscious of only one violent thought, thudding against his head like a hammer-blow.
Why
could he not forget her? Why – every now and again – did this desire for her come clawing its way inside him. Unbidden. Unwelcome.

The February wind was very cold and now, as the day's elation faded, he knew he was tired. The last few miles would be long.

They passed. And then, as he stood at the top of St Jude's Street, in the place where Cara Adeane used to live, refusing Luke Thackray's invitation to step inside and sample his mother's ginger parkin and her strong tea, the shadow that was Oliver Rattrie slipped past them going down the hill towards Market Square.

How, when they had left him so far behind them, had he arrived so fast? Daniel asked the question. Luke, a shade wearily thought Daniel, shrugged his shoulders.

‘He was heading for the road to meet a friend. Maybe the friend had a carriage.'

‘His paymaster?'

‘Very likely.'

‘How much harm can he do you, Luke?'

Once again the eye corners crinkled with his smile and – once again – there was a hint of weariness in his shoulders as they lifted in a shrug. The gesture not of a man who no longer cared but who had perhaps had enough.

‘There were ten thousand men around Oastler today. The millmasters can hardly sack us all.'

‘They can make examples of a few, though – to encourage the others.'

‘So they can.'

‘And you'd be the right man to choose, wouldn't you with your radical connections? Your father killed at Peterloo, I mean …'

‘Aye.' Luke grinned. ‘And my mother giving free board and lodging to the Chartist candidate.'

‘I'm sorry, Luke. Will he turn you in?'

‘I should think so. Me and as many of the others as he can remember. But we all knew that when we set off for Huddersfield this morning.'

‘If you lose your job can you get another?'

‘Not in Frizingley.'

‘It's not the only place in the world.'

‘I reckon I agree with that.'

They shook hands.

‘It won't happen tomorrow,' Luke said. ‘And whether it happens at all will depend on who really pulls Oliver's strings. If it's Ben Braithwaite then he might not want to lose a hard-working overlooker like me, even if it
does
come out that I'm a founder member of Frizingley's Short Time Committee. But if Oliver's master is somebody else, then my skill as a loom-tuner and my twenty-two years service at Braithwaite's mill may not cut much ice.'

Twenty-two years. Daniel was horrified.

‘I'm thirty,' said Luke, reading the question in his face.

‘And I've never stayed in one place,' said Daniel, ‘for more than a year or two in my life.'

Suddenly, and very urgently, Frizingley was beginning to seem far too familiar to Daniel, to close in around him like the cage he had spent his life avoiding.

Luke smiled and nodded his head.

‘Come and talk to our Short Time Committee before you leave. We meet every Thursday night at the Dog and Gun. Come and see Oastler again too, while you can. It's going to be a fine sight watching him raise the North again. High time, I reckon.'

‘High time,' said Daniel. But it was not of Richard Oastler or the raising of the North that he was thinking.

For Cara the start of the New Year of 1844 was a time of assessment, most of it pleasurable. Her order books were full and Miss Ernestine Baker's – as she knew from further desertions among Miss Baker's staff – most lamentably empty. Her reputation, both for originality and reliability, was growing, Miss Baker's foundering, among rumours – discreetly fanned by Cara herself – of that good lady's immiment retirement due to the failure of her eyesight, her nerve and her temperament.

‘Selling up? Oh – no doubt it is only gossip,' Cara would reply innocently to an enquiry from Mrs Colclough or Mrs Lord. ‘Although – well – she is not young, of course – it
might
be true. Oh dear – I suppose I shall have to glance at her stock as a matter of charity – although what I shall do with such a mound of parlourmaid's calico and those miles of purple satin, I can't imagine.'

‘What a wicked girl you are,' murmured Marie Moon who came fairly often – whenever the mood took her and no one else would have her – to sip her red wine, her champagne or, at times of particular stress, her gin in Cara's back room where, always exquisitely dressed and slightly dishevelled, always with a bite mark of passion or a bruise of anger somewhere about her body, she would talk of her new lover, the wild-eyed, weak-chinned young Lark whose brand of cruelty she now infinitely preferred to Christie Goldsborough's.

‘It is the feeling of having a dear little Persian kitten on one's lap, purring one moment and flexing tiger-claws the next. It is the feeling of giving everything one has – everything one is. A total offering of oneself – a gift – without expectations or conditions –'

Cara nodded and smiled and did not listen having heard the same declaration several times before, continuing – as Marie wildly enthused – with her own immaculate bookkeeping, the neat columns of figures which told her that for the first time in her life she was free from the basic, primitive and all too familiar anxiety of how to get through the winter. For
this
year, no matter how cold the wind blew, no matter how keen the frost or how deep the snow she was
assured
, not only of the wherewithal to keep body and soul together, but of plenty. Of a surplus even so that the formerly all-absorbing matters of heat and light and food, of new boots and warm clothing and ready money to pay a doctor for Liam should he require one no longer concerned her. She knew she could have all these things. They presented no problems, had removed themselves from the persistent ache they had once occupied at the back of her mind. Now it was no longer a stark matter of enduring the winter but of enjoying it, of daring – for the first time – to look ahead with confidence and anticipation, with a fine sense of getting her teeth into this brand new era of expansion, this local goldfield of opportunity which – according to Christie Goldsborough, and she had no reason to doubt him – would surely bring the railway, before long, to Frizingley.

Frequently, and in a state of high glee, she dreamed of it. Goods trains bringing her, at top speed, the bales of silk which reached her now so slowly, so uncertainly, on the rutted road from Leeds. Passenger trains cutting out her own tedious carriage journeys on that road to bargain with her suppliers. A station hotel alive with potential customers. Frizingley no longer hidden behind its encircling hills but open to the world, not just of commercial gentlemen seeking increased opportunities for trade but their ladies, seeking adornment, susceptible to the kind of temptation Miss Cara Adeane knew how to provide.

The station would, of necessity, be in the neighbourhood of Market Square.

‘You'll leave my premises alone,' she had warned, pleaded, enquired of Christie, knowing the decision would be largely his, making herself very pleasant to the railway engineers who sometimes dined at his table.

‘You wouldn't be wanting to knock my house down, Christie?'

‘Wouldn't I?'

‘No. You wouldn't. The top end of Market Square would suit a station better.'

‘Miss Ernestine Baker's end you mean?'

‘I do. It's flatter. And far enough from St Jude's not to trouble the passengers when they stay at the fine hotel you'll be building.'

‘And near enough to Miss Adeane's when they go shopping?'

‘That's right. And since Miss Baker is about to retire in any case …'

‘Who told you so?'

‘Oh – it's common knowledge.'

‘I see. So there'd be no harm in my knocking
her
house down?'

‘None at all. That's about as much as it's good for.'

‘I dare say. But then,
your
house may turn out a more convenient place to end the track. In which case, my dear, I do regret …'

But when the site was officially chosen, although it left Miss Baker's premises regrettably intact, it proved most advantageous for Cara, the station yard itself at a sufficient distance to save her the worst annoyances of steam and noise and the congestion of waiting carriages and cabs, but the accompanying hotel – in all its presumed magnificence – near enough for her shop to be seen clearly from all its front windows.

Only two issues now remained to vex her; the question of space, of extra windows of her own to display the new range of goods she spent her nights so avidly planning, extra floor-space to accommodate her new range of customers with a degree of arm-chaired, foot-stooled comfort which would induce them to linger. And the even more urgent matter of unpaid accounts.

No problem existed, of course, with the ‘millocracy' – all accounts sent in to the Colcloughs and Braithwaites, the Lords and Dallams, being settled promptly on their due date and in full. No problem would arise – she felt quite certain – with the ‘passing'railway trade to whom she envisaged the sale of ready-made goods for which credit could neither be expected nor given. But the slow and grudging manner in which Mrs Audrey Covington-Pym paid her debts, the number of times it seemed necessary to send in one's invoice in order to attract so much as that esquestrian lady's attention, had done Cara's temper no good. While Lady Lark, at present blithely ordering Easter bonnets for herself and her tribe of daughters, nieces, resident cousins, had paid not one penny as yet for the outfits they had all worn at the Colclough wedding in September.

‘Have I your account?' she asked blankly when Cara, very apologetically, mentioned it, her aristocratic and painfully raised eyebrow clearly wondering why anyone should think it right to trouble
her
with such sordid matters.

‘I will let you have it at once,' promised Cara humbly, omitting to add that she had sent it four times already. ‘And for December too.'

‘December?' Lady Lark had never, it seemed, heard of ‘December'. Nor could she imagine what it might have to do with her.

Cara told her. ‘The Christmas ball dresses, madam – for yourself and your daughters. Four velvet, four satin, one tulle with spangles, one plain tulle, two watered-silk, one silk gauze, one gold brocade. Fourteen in all …'